3 Ways to Customise Work-Life Balance When You are Starting a New Job

It is schedule dependent

“Direction is more important than speed.” — Darren Hardy

Work-life balance is a goal for every professional. And the ones who achieve it have an organised day throughout. Meeting tight deadlines, dedicating off-work hours for physical and mental well-being, they do all these activities in rhythm.

If you have tried and failed, then I am proud of you because it is a challenge in itself and taking the first step is the hardest decision. Since you have done it in the past, you know the direction to start when you get back up again. You have a standard checkpoint which you will leverage when needed.

Depending on what kind of work hours you have, utilising out-of-work hours will look different for you. I used to do 9 to 5 job along with dedicated freelancing till 31 December 2019. I left my full-time role on 31st. But most of the experiments I tried are independent of work-hours.

I wanted to see what work-life balance would look like if I want to be productive at work while focusing on personal growth in me-time.

1. Never bring office responsibilities home

It starts with respecting the office and home environment and utilising them for their purpose. The moment you drag office work to home, your home turns into a secondary office where you are not able to concentrate because of the relaxing vibes that you get, near distance to bed and one-click access to Netflix on speakers.

Home is where you feel relaxed and be yourself without anyone’s approval. It can only happen when you leave office work finished there itself.

You may not finish all office tasks every day. But that doesn’t mean bringing you work-laptop home and trying to focus in a not-so-work environment.

You can work at home; it is fine to do that. But if you don’t have a dedicated work-station at home, then it is challenging to create a work environment in your bedroom.

Bedroom sparks cosiness, it fulfils your desire to relax. Entering the bedroom does not provide you with alertness to work on your office material.

Even if you finish all the work-tasks, you will most probably have less productivity at home because of communication issues with coworkers and let’s agree: you are exhausted. Sun is going down; you also feel like it. Alertness is taking a dip there. Forcing will just make it harder.

2. Do important things first when starting out

My all coworkers are having daily stand-up where they update about three things:

• accomplishments since the last stand-up
• upcoming schedule for the day
• blockers

Based on this, they have a set number of tasks to finish in a given day. Even if the functions are not canonical, you can categorise based on difficulty and urgency level to see what is need of the hour and then work through important ones first.

Your energy drains continuously throughout the day. Even if you have sufficient lunch also, freshness diminishes because your brain is responding to all the signals it receives.

Activities like scheduled meetings require attention, contrary to lunch and coffee breaks. If you try to multitask between all these, your attention span will decrease with time.

Remember the foosball sound when you try to eat in the office cafe? Remember your coworker, who is an energy vampire, talks with you every time and you wish if he could be dumb for just one day?

While avoiding every distraction can be difficult, doing the most important things first saves the rest of the energy for work that requires less mental effort.

3. Have boundaries

To achieve the balance between maximum productivity at work and healthy lifestyle out of work, you need to have boundaries between professional and personal life.

It can be anything like spending weekends all by yourself, avoiding conversation with family and friends during work unless it is something important, or just leaving your work laptop at the office to release the stress.

The last one was a stress buster for me. I know my problems are there, but they are waiting for me at a place where I can handle them efficiently.

Having boundaries is essential. It shows a lot about your preferences and selective interactions with people. It doesn’t mean you are a jerk. It means that you have priorities outside of work that you don’t want to be interrupted.

This post belongs to a series of articles I am publishing in this 21-day streak. See the first one here. It is the seventh one in the lineup — 14 more to go.

To read the remaining ones, navigate to the end of the first article where there is a reference list sorted by day number.

~ Sanjeev